Our grandson Naveh lost his tefillin two years ago. They were a prized possession, ordered from a scribe whom he had met early in his bar mitzvah preparation process and had given them to Naveh with a blessing before his bar mitzvah.
A religious boy, Naveh prayed with them every weekday morning and packed them in hand luggage whenever he went on a trip. Since seventh grade, he has studied in a yeshiva high school in Zichron Ya’acov, a 15-minute public bus ride from his home in Binyamina.
After school, he was the captain of the Binyamina youth soccer team, a mix of Jewish players from all the schools in Binyamina and Arab youth from nearby villages.
Three years later, when he was 16, Naveh was rushing to get ready for school when he realized that his tefillin bag wasn’t in its usual place in his room.
Over and over, he searched the house where he lives with his parents – our son, Avi, and his wife, Hadas – and four brothers. Naveh hoped he had left the tefillin bag in the high school where they have morning prayers, but he was already worried.
Naveh’s heart sank when the tefillin weren’t at school.
The only other place he might have left them was on the bus.
Naveh asked the bus driver if he’d found the tefillin.
He went to the bus lost and found department in Haifa.
He went to the bus lost and found department in Hadera.
He contacted the main office of Superbus.
He put up signs in Binyamina, Zichron Ya’acov, and Givat Ada.
He kept a paper with his name and phone number inside his tefillin bag.
He hoped someone might call.
But no one did.
Naveh was bereft.
“We had a spare set of tefillin in our home, so it wasn’t as if I had no tefillin with which to pray. But I missed my own tefillin and also felt devastatingly irresponsible. They were my most important possession. My homeroom teacher saw how defeated I felt and offered to buy me new ones, but of course, I refused. I lost my tefillin, and I’d have to live with that,” he said.
Naveh turned 18 in March.
A 12-grader, he had given up soccer to focus on his matriculation exams. He finished his term as a Bnei Akiva counselor, got his driver’s license (first test!), and was emotionally moved by the yeshiva’s heritage trip to Poland. His late maternal great-grandparents survived the Holocaust, and he prayed for the elevation of their souls and of the other relatives who perished.
He was deciding where he would study Torah for a year before entering the IDF, like his two older brothers.
Then, one day recently, his mother, a college instructor and educational leader, received an odd phone call.
An odd phone call
The woman on the phone introduced herself as the secretary of the Israel Football Association. “Are you Naveh’s mother?”
Indeed, she was, but Hadas quickly added that Naveh was no longer playing on the local youth team.
No, it wasn’t about that, the secretary said. Someone wanted to talk to her; could the secretary connect them?
A man was on the other end of the line. He said his name was Michael. He lives in Bnei Brak and studies in a kollel (advanced Torah-study institute). “I think I have your son’s tefillin,” he said.
And he quickly filled in the rest.
Recently, Michael’s brother-in-law had met with a man whose nickname was Jerby.
At the end of the meeting, Jerby mentioned that he had a pair of tefillin that had come his way. Jerby didn’t need them; he had his own tefillin.
Perhaps Michael’s brother-in-law could find a place to donate them to a needy boy. He then gave them to Michael.
Michael could see by the handiwork that these were carefully crafted tefillin. Inside the bag was also a siddur (prayer book). Engraved on the cover was the name Naveh Yisrael and his last name.
The mitzvah of returning a lost item, hashavat aveidah, requires a person to actively seek out and return lost property to its rightful owner, provided that the item has markings that allow it to be identified. The obligation holds even if the owner may have given up the hope of finding it.
Michael doesn’t have the Internet or a smartphone at home, but he used his yeshiva’s computer to search for a “Naveh Yisrael.”
Israel Football League
He found one entry – in the registry of the Israel Football League.
The secretary was suspicious and wouldn’t hand over any contact numbers for Naveh Yisrael. At last, the secretary yielded to Michael’s pleas and called Hadas, who had signed an old permission slip.
On a recent Friday, when the family drove to visit one of Naveh’s older brothers at his military base, they stopped in Bnei Brak.
Naveh went into the kollel, which was buzzing with the sound of Torah study.
For the second time in his life, his beloved tefillin were handed back to him with a blessing. Michael reassured him that he’d had the tefillin checked by an expert.
No one knows where the tefillin spent two years.
“I think they were being used,” Naveh said. “The leather of unused tefillin takes on an unpleasant scent, and my tefillin still smelled good. I’m sure they were put to good purpose. Still, I’m thrilled to get them back.”
Naveh’s fingers trembled as he put on his beloved tefillin, binding them as a sign upon his hands and frontlets between his eyes.
May they guide Naveh Yisrael throughout the pleasures and challenges of Jewish manhood.The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers.